Troubler le protocole de dépucelage : désir, subjectivité sexuelle et autisme dans Mon père m’a donné un mari de Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam

This paper investigates the under-examined play, Mon père m’a donné un mari, written by French author Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam. The play centres around sixteen-year-old Alexandrine who is identified as Asperger and who masturbates in front of her parents. We argue that by focusing on an epistemic framework intersecting literary studies with Mad/SickGirl Studies, we can explain how Alexandrine’s parents confine her in what we call a “heteronormative corset”, a parentally-informed virginity loss protocol which is entwined with ableist and adult-centric stereotypes. We then address the unravelling of this protocol by insisting that at the core of Alexandrine’s “sick/mad language” there is a queer sexual subjectivity that troubles this protocol of virginity loss as the single-most defining experience marking the end of girlhood.